anticipating Thanksgiving

So, I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving weekend, but at the same time, I’m dreading the finals that are just around the corner.

My professor for Property said last week that 1st semester finals during the first year are the worst, because you haven’t really taken any law school finals yet, and you don’t know what it’s going to be like. (She went to Stanford, and I don’t know whether they have practice exams there.)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to being home in Irvine this weekend. I plan to drive down by myself, which will be long. Especially since I’m still recovering from being sick this past weekend. And the traffic coming back up on Sunday night has historically been very, very bad. (One fellow law student said it took 10 hours from LA to Davis last year—a drive which normally takes about 6).

Please pray for traveling mercies for me.

On another note:

Check out the link to “louie’s journal” from the following link.

Click on "louie's journal archives", the button on the left side. I’ve been reading them in chronological order, telling myself not to read more than 2 entries per day, because they have so much for me to digest. I just read the October 12 entry from 1998, and I particularly recommend that one, though most are quite good.

Excerpts

Below are some excerpts from various emails (sp?) that I wrote to various friends at various times over the last few months.

___

Good to hear from you. (Good to remember that I had another life before law school.) It's pretty hard, in terms of workload. Not quite as intellectually challenging as I thought it would be, but lots of dense reading to slog through. It's keeping me very busy. I'm occasionally caught up, but most of the rest of the time, I'm just a bit behind.

My feelings about law school are up and down. There are times when I feel pretty good ("irrational exuberance?"), but at other times, I'm a bit disappointed that it's not as meaningful as I'd thought it'd be.

And, the workload is a constant burden. I've stopped briefing for some of my classes, simply because I didn't want to be too overloaded. And there's the outlining, which I need to get started on.

My fellow students are mostly pretty cool, though. I can see why friendships formed here last long past law school.

___

My roommates and some fellow classmates took me out to dinner, which was a much anticipated break from studying. It was a lot of good conversation, funny stories, and generally a lot of fun, but in the midst of it, I missed being at Bethel, sharing fellowship with other believers.

My roommates and my closest friends here are not Christians, and it's exciting and challenging to try to imitate Christ amongst them. (I haven't completely committed to a church yet.) It's also pretty daunting, since most are very bright, and have lots of life experience, and are somewhat set in their own beliefs (or lack of them). And my frequent mistakes don't help.

But anyway, while I feel good about growing here, at the same time, I miss [friends] at Bethel. I'm looking forward to coming home at Thanksgiving and seeing all of you.

___

Went out to dinner with friends from law school, heard funny stories, had good conversations. Very fun.

Turning 26 has made me feel older. Especially when I'm around undergrads, some of whom are 18 or even 17. Turning 25 last year didn't bother me as much, but perhaps that's because I didn't ride the bus with undergrads every day. Not that it's a big big deal, but it's becoming a growing concern.

Hmmm--what is the concern? Not really about marriage (although a number of my good friends are now married, many are not. And I think the male advantage of extended eligibility helps). It's more about not having accomplished very much in life, and not having acquired as much wisdom, confidence, self-discipline, as I would have liked to have acquired. Not having mastered my personal flaws, or overcome my personal weaknesses.

Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Isaac Newton, and most of the major mathematicians accomplished their greatest works before their mid 30's. Not to say that I expect to have done the same by the same age, nor to say some of them didn't feel a similar dissatisfaction with their lives that I do.

But rather, that there's a certain satisfaction that comes of having done hard, engrossing, (perhaps consuming) worthwhile work. I don't feel close to having done so. Ok, maybe I have felt close to it, on certain occasions. But I don't know my life's work yet. My personal mission statement, to the level of detail that I'd like.

Pacing, grumbling, etc.

(I wrote most of the following a number of weeks ago.)

This past week was tough. But not as bad as the week before. In the past 2 weeks, most of the first year class has had 4 practice exams, since we're now a bit past halfway through the fall semester. We all have a total of 6 classes. Hmmm--it occurs to me that I don't think I've listed what classes I have. They are:

Contracts
Property
Criminal Law
Legal Research
Civil Procedure (basic mechanics of lawyering)
Torts (most of the lawsuit stuff you read about in the paper)

Practice exams don't affect your grade. I believe that the reason for this is that law professors want to do as little grading as possible, so they grade your midterms (in December), and your finals (in May), and assign you your grade solely on the basis of those 2 exams. In fact, the midterms in some classes don't even count for very much, which may be for the same reasons.

But since midterms are significant, and we haven't had any quizzes or homework in any classes (except our legal research class), profs for 1st year classes give us these practice exams, to help us know whether we've been understanding and integrating the material at a deep enough level.

So, those briefs that I mentioned earlier, as well as our class notes, are supposed to be reviewed. The general method of study that everyone learns about in law school (and many people follow), is to prepare an outline for each class. This means creating a Word document with an outline of all the material covered in the class so far. Depending on how much detail is put in (most students put in all salient points the prof mentioned), these outlines can run 50 pages or more by the end of the year. Other outlines summarize and leave out things and are shorter.

So, in preparing for these practice exams, all the 1L's (first year law students) have been spending long hours preparing these outlines by synthesizing their class notes with their briefs. Then, we read and reread the outlines we've prepared (and the ones we've gotten from other people) to prepare for the practice tests. This in addition to the regular reading and briefing we're supposed to be doing.

Practice exams are actually something nice that our school does for us, for our benefit. At a number of other law schools, the first exam that law students see is in December, which counts for up to half of their grade. But it still turns the pressure up another few notches.

So, that's the reason why the past 2 weeks were hard.